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Search engine Cuil's rocky debut

On Day 1 yesterday of its attempt to dethrone Google Inc. as king of the Internet search engines, Cuil was shaping up to be a New Coke-style fiasco.

Vitriol was flying fast on tech maven Chris Brogan's IT blog. After waiting two hours for Cuil to return two results for his name, contributor Gopal Shenoy wrote: "(Cuil) is basically unusable – paint dries faster. Did they test this thing to see what the results are before they got coverage on CNN on how Google needs to be scared of them?"

Cuil, pronounced "cool," is the latest in a long list of also-ran or failed challenges to Google, which displaced then-leader AltaVista soon after its 1998 launch by twentysomething Stanford University computer-science whizzes Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who became the world's youngest billionaires when Google went public.

Google is an irresistible target, with its $16.6 billion (U.S.) in 2007 revenues and market cap of $150.3 billion. With its lush profit of $4 billion last year, you could buy most of the U.S. airline industry.

Anyone reaping that kind of money attracts rivals. Given that the Web hosts about 150 billion pages and growing, and traditional advertising is migrating to the Internet, surely Google needn't indefinitely command more than half the market for Web search when even General Motors Corp. ultimately had to surrender its 55-per-cent market share after a half-century in business.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Google looks impregnable, with its 62 per cent of the U.S. search market, to Yahoo Inc.'s 21 per cent and otherwise mighty Microsoft Corp.'s measly 8.2 per cent. Google is part of the language now. "Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Allen Weiner of tech analysis firm Gartner Inc. told AP yesterday. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

Just the same, Google's stock has tumbled 36 per cent from its 52-week high after the firm's torrid pace of revenue growth finally slowed in recent quarters. The company's hiring sprees have bloated its workforce to 20,000 employees. Big-ticket acquisitions including YouTube and DoubleClick have yet to translate into the quick profits Wall Street demands. (Google still gets 99 per cent of its revenue from online ads.) And Google's king-of-the-hill arrogance – most conspicuous in the way it brushes off increasing complaints about its practice of retaining data on users' search histories and web-surfing patterns – is calculated to attract pretenders.

And in Cuil, Google for the first time is in competition with former employees. Three of Cuil's co-founders – Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier – are former Google engineers, while CEO Tom Costello, Patterson's husband, has two prototype search engines to his credit. Patterson sold her specialized archival search engine to Google four years ago; and Monier is a former chief technology officer at AltaVista and helped build the search engine on eBay Inc.'s online auction site.

"Google can't ignore an attack from engineers it once found hire-worthy, much less the mastermind behind a technology it once found worth buying," Rick Munarriz argued on the Motley Fool website yesterday.

The Cuil hype is understandable, given its claim of indexing 120 billion Web pages compared with Google's estimated 40 billion. (Google stopped releasing the number of pages it has indexed three years ago.) Because of the way it categorizes pages, and more precisely matches search terms to pages, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Cuil promises users a faster, more efficient means of finding relevant information. And by focusing on page content rather than click history, Cuil doesn't need to store users' search histories.

"Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet," Costello said in a statement, "placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user."

Alas, when I took Cuil for a spin I found that "David Olive" – the name I share with a PhD in theoretical physics in Swansea, Wales, and a computer-repair geek in Perth, Australia, among others – turned up 381,000 times on Google, 22.3 million times on Yahoo and zero times on Cuil, which also couldn't find Stephen Harper.

Which got me wondering if, once the algorithms are tweaked, Cuil is destined to become mere takeover bait for the likes of Microsoft, which has snapped up search engine Powerset and whose ardour for Yahoo likely hasn't diminished after last month's failed first attempt to buy the No. 2 player.

To earn even that status, Cuil will have to start delivering on its promise sooner than later, or the wrong kind of word-of-mouth will ease it into an early grave.

Back on ChrisBrogan.com, they're still cavilling that a Cuil search for "Jaguar" turned up nothing, that other searches yielded long-abandoned Web pages, and that even Cuil's "About Us" link didn't work. "In this biz you get one chance," wrote one of the more charitable reviewers. "They blew it. Back to Google."

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